A game must be beautiful. A game must be playable. Traditionally, RPGs and Wargames were the ones known to compromise graphics for the sake of gameplay («use your head, that's where the game is!»). Sometimes you had to use your imagination a bit too much to imagine the real Red Dragon, sometimes your friends could not understand what's going on unless you were to explain them what these square pixels really mean («it's the best elven armour around, don't you see?»). Well, not anymore.

To our luck, Deus Ex, Outcast and Icewind Dale are the examples of how this attitude has evolved: a compromise between playability and graphics seems to be just around the corner. When we started Fatherdale back in '97, we decided that the game must look good enough to seduce a woman. Or to get our parents to understand what is actually happening on the screen. No huge polygons, no ugly textures, no square faces — the beauty is in the small things. Smooth transitions. Delicate lighting. And this is how we built Fatherdale.

Isometric View

The most convenient view for the RPG/Adventure games, a de facto standard for the genres. Allows the best balance between easy controls/interface and high level of details for NPC/ingame world. The scale also provides the best compromise between having richly detailed characters (necessary for adventure and storyline) and the ability to see your whole party on the same screen (crucial for combat scenes).

Dynamic Texturing

Terrain is textured in real-time with automatic anti-aliasing, allowing to use hundreds of separate textures in different sets to quickly create realistic smoothly-painted landscapes fit to the needs of particular location. The technology consumes little memory and the end-results are on par with the pre-rendered landscapes or tiled surfaces. The technology and corresponding tool set allow our artists to create new locations quickly and efficiently — as well as edit the existing ones with a single touch rather than through the standard re-render routine. This is essential for the balance of gameplay as the process of proper testing always requires small changes.

Unlimited Multitexturing

An unlimited number of textures can be overlaid over the same spot with different transparency settings, making possible not only complex solutions like the beach lines and stones mixed with sand and traces of grass, but also the real-time interactive events like blood spots on the ground (where the existing texture mask is painted over with the semitransparent blood stains) or traces on the path (where a darker modifier is applied to the existing texture mask).

True Alpha Channel

Unlike any other technology previously used for the games of this genre, the engine has not one or two, but many levels of transparency — thus making possible a multitude of special effects like realistic flame, smoke, mist and rain. Take any character in the game and lead him into the forest; the play of shadows from the overhanging trees makes up for a very realistic forest ambush.

True-color Vertex Lighting (Terrain)

True-color lighting with different variables at each vertex of terrain, including ambient light (day-night cycle), colour spots (light rays from windows at night) and dynamic light masks (fires and torches) is used to fill locations with rich colour contrasts.

True-color Lighting (Objects)

True-color lighting for all of the ingame objects, including houses and characters means that all special effects, multiple shadows and light masks affect not only the texture, but objects as well.

Huge Locations

Because of the real-time texturing and optimised memory management, a location can easily take up to 40x40 screens (compare to Baldur's Gate), providing the right size for the exploration part of the gameplay and broadening the borders of ingame world.

Outdoor Environments

Because of the view and the combination of real-time and pre-rendered parts, the engine is capable of taking players to explore realistic outdoor environments. Where storyline takes lead characters into a forest to make an ambush or to silently walk past one, Fatherdale presents dense and realistic location impossible to build with any 3D engine.

Pre-rendered Objects & Characters

Trees, houses and character parts are pre-rendered from eight cameras to undergo a complex post-processing technique for enhanced level of detail and balance of colours. Unlike the results of 3D engine, this technology allows to provide ingame world with the maximum possible level of details and aliasing.

Unique Palettes

Every character part and every object in the game have their own unique palette that can be changed. Using the same shape but different colors to save memory while providing a higher level of diversity, this allows to use the same sprite of fir, for example, with four different palette sets to create a realistic array of firs where no two near trees have the same color. Furthermore, a pre-rendered shirt of a certain shape can be used by one character with the red palette and by another with blue, resulting in two distinctly different cloth items at the price of only 1K of memory. On the tool level, this allows the artists and designers to create new characters faster and more efficiently as they can use the already existing parts and objects with the new palettes to create new appearances.

3D Terrain

This one is really simple: 3D terrain contributes to realistic shadowing and movement of characters, making locations easily perceptible.